Part three of four.
It may seem odd to talk about “winners” when reconsidering a global pandemic, but there were individuals and groups that gained prestige, publicity, or some other advantage as a result. It was unintentional but nonetheless true. They were:
- Doctors & Nurses (including all the medical staff here, too). While hospitals may have suffered financially, the heroic efforts of doctors, nurses, and staff to provide relief and comfort was the #1 heartwarming story of the pandemic. Oftentimes they were the only ones there while quarantined patients took their last breath, comforting them before somehow moving on to the next gasping patient. How they did this for so long, under such tough conditions, is truly remarkable. There are hundreds of impassioned video shorts about them already. Movies will be made, books written about their heroism, all the while being in close contact with the same deadly virus. They deserve it, one and all.
2) Teachers. Hey, aren’t you the same guy who called the teachers’ unions “losers”? Yes. But the teachers themselves merit praise. Anyone who has tried to conduct any organizational effort online knows how hard it is. Teachers got handed an impromptu script for “online learning” and somehow pulled it off. Then they had to return to classrooms with masks and social distancing and quarantines and make that work. We know it wasn’t as good as in-person learning. We know it failed in many cases. But that wasn’t the teachers’ fault, and certainly not for lack of trying. Whatever stupidity their unions came up with, the teachers themselves gave one-hundred percent effort.
3) Employees/workers, especially those blue collar types who found themselves labelled “essential.” That label must have been a surprise, given the pay they normally receive. They had to keep going out, keep being exposed, even when they had no health care insurance or sick leave. But in the end, the imbalance between job vacancies and employees in many fields has given them new-found bartering power, and many are switching jobs or careers or just getting a raise. Sadly, this imbalance won’t last much longer, so here’s hoping they all come out at least a little happier and financially healthier.
4) Proponents of early government actions. Which government actions? In the long run it didn’t really matter. The hard part in a global pandemic is getting the people to realize life has suddenly changed in a way it hadn’t before in their lifetime. Doing something at the national level is key to forging that understanding. So while stopping flights or closing borders or ordering mask mandates are all only temporarily beneficial, they send the message. Leaders who did so had more success during the pandemic.
5) Candidate Joe Biden. And I say this not just because President Trump was the biggest pandemic loser. Biden benefited from a pandemic primary in which his strongest opponent (Sanders) was a firebrand promising big change. In response, Joe was the steady one. During the general election, the pandemic provided a handy excuse to limit his public exposure: few gaffes, no stumbling or shuffling around, no exhaustion on the campaign trail. In a regular election, this would have failed, but during a pandemic, it seemed quite normal. Thus a man who ran three times for President and never got more than 1% in any of his aborted campaigns received over eighty-one million votes, the most in US presidential history. The corona virus gave Biden more votes than Kamala Harris ever did.
6) Big Pharma. About half of viral vaccines fail before Phase I (human trials). The success rate from Phase I to Phase III is under twenty percent. The labs and the scientists were working under the same social distancing and quarantine protocols as the rest of the world (although they were probably more used to that!). Somehow Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca produced different, successful vaccines in less than a year. Yes, governments showered money on them. More importantly, governments closely supervised the process to ensure safety while maximizing speed, and insured the efforts so that–if they failed–the drug-makers would not get sued or go bankrupt. Russia and China “borrowed” concepts or blueprints and came out with suboptimal results. Big Pharma, not government-run health, came through in the pinch, end of story.
7) Knowledge workers. I mentioned how blue-collar types “won” in terms of respect, more options, and better pay. White-collar knowledge workers did too. These folks had been arguing for better work-life balance for years, and were gradually winning a battle for more work-from-home time. Be careful what you ask for, because they got it! While few if any jobs can be totally remote, the pandemic period of total work-from-home made a strong argument to re-evaluate what can and can’t be done outside the office, with much more being labeled as “can” than “can’t.” How to prevent this trend from becoming work-all-the-time is the new challenge for these workers.
8) E-commerce and online retailers. Whether it was Amazon or JD and Alibaba (China), online retailers made out in a big way. You could not go out and shop. You could not travel or spend on services like restaurants or clubs or gyms. There were no events. But the online marketplaces remained open, twenty-four/seven as they say, and business was good. In fact the inflationary effects of huge demand for products when supply was limited by both production shutdowns and shipping backlogs contributed greatly to our current economic problems. Even older cohorts who had disdained online commerce as unsafe moved into online banking and retailing, and they won’t be going back.
9) Streaming services. Cutting the cord was already a going trend, but the hours and hours of home stay provided the perfect opportunity to investigate ditching a cable bundle of thousands of worthless channels for a custom set of streaming apps with thousands of worthless shows. Kidding. Unlike cable bundles which had large upfront costs and infrastructure, streaming services were generally cheaper and disposable. Although many cable-cutters found that purchasing a series of streams was almost as expensive, they were more flexible, and those who ruthlessly watched and cancelled could come out ahead. The era of a nation watching a show on the telly was finally put to rest by the pandemic. At best now, we binge the same season at a time.
10) Taiwan. Some countries (sorry, China) get all the breaks. It’s an island, with a compliant population that trusts its government. It had a dry-run with the SARS epidemic. It is not that much of a tourist destination. And it knows mainland China all-too-well. Taiwan was the first to inform the World Health Organization (WHO) that China was lying about person-to-person transmission. Taiwan shut down travel links with the mainland early and introduced pretty draconian contact tracing and quarantines. Eventually they settled on a crowd-sourced QR code, with every person scanning the code as they entered a building (work, restaurant, store) which gave the government a real-time data base of where you were and when you were. If you didn’t have a smartphone, you signed in a register, or you didn’t get in. Shame worked well: people who got sick felt the need to apologize for not being careful. Taiwan made mistakes: they worked on their own vaccine, which was slow, and they did so well during the early phases of the pandemic that people were lax on getting vaccinated, which left them vulnerable to a wave when the mutations came. But overall their economy did well and they avoided the mass deaths and trauma so many other countries experienced. They looked especially good in comparison to the performance of their mainland rival.
Next post: What are the long-term effects of the pandemic?